It feels like this is the line people are using to justify the expense of compute capex

The fact that you can sell or lease out something for more than you bought it for is justification in and of itself.

I run a consumer AI product and the current reality of trying to get compute vs what it was 6-12 months ago is enough to justify it to anyone who has the money.

I think OpenClaw created a mania that was completely unfounded (Apple Silicon is worth dirt compared to literally anything from NVIDIA including consumer GPUs), but the prediction of compute becoming scarce was correct